‘Show me what?’

He straightened his shirt, then turned back to face her. ‘I’ll take you to meet her. You can see for yourself why I don’t want my mother anywhere near our wedding.’

* * *

The car came to a stop outside an immaculate two-storey house in a quiet Athenian suburb.

No sooner had the engine been turned off than Christian got out, not bothering to wait for the driver to open the door for him.

The entire drive had been conducted in silence, Christian sitting ramrod-straight, only the whiteness of his knuckles betraying what lay beneath his skin.

It was a demeanour Alessandra had never seen from him before. It unnerved her.

That he’d cancelled his first appointment of the day had unnerved her even more; that, and the grim way he’d said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

sense of dread that she followed him out of the car

the door, lines all over her weathered face, her thin lips clamped together in an obvious

heel and walked back inside, leaving the door open for them

pristine, a strong smell of

beautiful

introduced them, and looking through her when Alessandra said, ‘Hárika ya tin gnorimía,’— ‘pleased to meet you’—a phrase she’d practised with the girl who’d brought breakfast to her suite that morning after Christian had grudgingly

together in the immaculate kitchen, where the stench of

her son. She was speaking harshly to him in quick-fire Greek, whatever she said enough to make the pulse in his jawline throb. When he replied, his answers were short but measured. At one point he seemed to be the one doing the talking rather than the listening, his words making Elena dart her blue

had never sat in such a poisonous atmosphere as this,

demeanour. Her eyes were the same blue as Christian’s but were like a frozen winter morning

icy as Elena’s eyes. But Christian couldn’t leave it to imaginings. He’d lived it, every

any form of emotional

the name Markos stood for guts and determination but had not appreciated then exactly how great his determination must have been, not just to drag himself and his mother out

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